Super Charge Your Site With CloudFlare

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Posted by: Jennifer Zelazny on April 11, 2012

Categorized: High Performance Optimization, WordPress Plugins

Tagged: ,

We have had a few clients recently come to us looking to help “speed up” their site. After tweaking server settings, themes, plugins, etc – we then also recommend something that has produced good results: CloudFlare.

From CloudFlare:

CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.

Sound good? CloudFlare also claims:

On average, a website on CloudFlare
- loads twice as fast
- uses 60% less bandwidth
- has 65% fewer requests
- is way more secure
All for free!

They have different packages – from free to $20/month. If you have some time – take a look at their site, and give them a shot. We use them here and have been very happy with everything (they even have a WordPress plugin).

HOWTO: Add TinyMCE to a Textarea in WordPress

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Posted by: Jennifer Zelazny on March 27, 2012

Categorized: HOWTOs, SDAC Blog, WordPress

Tagged: , ,

If you are building a plugin or simply adding some custom fields for your theme and would like to use the WordPress Visual/HTML editor – you can – with one easy line of code:

<?php wp_editor( $content, $editor_id, $settings = array() ); ?>

No extra added JS or anything else is needed! It is that simple. (This was introduced with WordPress 3.3)

Used in a real world example (custom fields for a custom post type):

<?php wp_editor( $sdac_profile_general_description, 'sdac_profile_general_description' );?>

That outputs a text area with the name “sdac_profile_general_description” and the value of the custom field.

I hope this helps out next time you find yourself wanting the Visual/HTML editor in place but struggling to get all the needed JS/HTML in place.

Further Documentation: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_editor

HOWTO: Show Page Template Name

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Posted by: Jennifer Zelazny on November 28, 2011

Categorized: SDAC, WordPress, WordPress Themes, WordPress Troubleshooting

Tagged: ,

A cool function to simply display the path of the WordPress template used on a particular page:

<?php echo get_page_template() ?>

How/when to use this?
If you are trying to debug a site and want to quickly see what page template is used – you can put that PHP code into footer.php and it will then echo out the path so you can quickly and easily see what template is being used.

SDAC Inc. Is Hiring

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Posted by: Jennifer Zelazny on November 28, 2011

Categorized: SDAC, SDAC News

Tagged:

Once again we are looking to expand our team. If you are a WordPress developer and would like to be involved in some great and unique WordPress projects – we want to hear from you. Check out our Craigslist post: http://chicago.craigslist.org/nwc/web/2724395805.html for the details.

HOWTO: Make WordPress Titles Title Case

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Posted by: Jennifer Zelazny on November 18, 2011

Categorized: HOWTOs, WordPress Logic

Tagged: ,

Ever need to make sure all your titles showed up with using “Title Case” and not just by using CSS? By adding the following to your functions.php file in your theme – you can ensure the post title will have the case you want:

/**
 * Custom Title Case for the_title()
 * @returns $content (title with title case)
 */
add_filter( 'the_title', 'sdac_use_title_case' );
add_filter( 'wp_title', 'sdac_use_title_case' );
function sdac_use_title_case( $content ) {
	$content = ucwords( $content );
	return $content;
}

Change WordPress Author Permalink

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Posted by: Jennifer Zelazny on October 19, 2011

Categorized: WordPress, WordPress Logic

Tagged: ,

Ever want to change the “author” permalink from something like /author/jzelazny to something more custom for your CMS like /teacher/jzelazny? This is relatively easy by adding a function to your functions.php file:

// Adjust your author permalink
add_action( 'init', 'custom_theme_init' );
function custom_theme_init() {
   global $wp_rewrite;
   // Change the value of the author permalink to teacher
   $wp_rewrite->author_base = 'teacher';
}

Flush your permalinks (Settings > Permalinks) and now all your /author/ pages will now be /teacher/.

Create Anti-Spam Email Address in WordPress

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Posted by: Jennifer Zelazny on October 12, 2011

Categorized: HOWTOs, WordPress

Tagged:

I recently found a gem in the WordPress documentation. If you are looking for a way to display an email address but you do not want to use the actual email address because you are worried about spam, worry no more. Check out the “antispambot()” function that we have in WordPress. This function will take the email address that you want to use and obfuscates it. When you view the page you see the actual email address. When you view the source you do not see you see an encoded email address.

Example
In the example below – I will am using the WordPress function “antispambot” to create a mailto link for the post author (this would go in the loop).

<a href="mailto:<?php echo antispambot(get_the_author_meta('user_email')); ?>">Email the Author</a>

Further Documentation
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/antispambot

SDAC Plugin Update: SDAC Related Content 2.3.1

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Posted by: Jennifer Zelazny on October 11, 2011

Categorized: SDAC, SDAC Products, WordPress, WordPress Plugins

Tagged:

We just released a new version of our WordPress Related Content plugin. This update is very minor (adds in a div that surrounds all the output) but it will significantly make styling your related results easier.

After you update your plugin – you can control the output by adding something like this to your stylesheet:

#sdac_related_posts h4 {border-bottom:1px dashed #c7c7bb;margin:15px 0 5px 0;padding-bottom:5px;}
#sdac_related_posts ul {margin:10px 0 10px 20px;}
#sdac_related_posts ul li {margin:0 0 3px 0;}

* The code above is what styles the related posts on this site.

SDAC Plugin Update: SDAC Post Slideshows 1.1.3

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Posted by: Jennifer Zelazny on September 7, 2011

Categorized: SDAC, SDAC News, SDAC Products

Tagged: ,

We just updated our SDAC Post Slideshows to version 1.1.3. The update includes:

  • Custom set height fix
  • Updated version of jQuery Cycle

Welcome Andy!

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Posted by: Jennifer Zelazny on September 1, 2011

Categorized: SDAC, SDAC News

Tagged: ,

I would personally like to welcome our new full time Web Developer – Andy Nguyen. He had been working with us as a contractor for the last few months working on WordPress plugin, advanced theme development and looked like a good fit for our company. I look forward to working with him and building great things!

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